Russ Miles, on twitter this morning, said "Java: in many ways the machine language of the JVM. Scala takes things much, much further, introducing power with higher level constructs." Cool idea, that we're now machine language programmers.

It puts Java in perspective. All the complaints about how Java's so simple become a lot more tolerable if you think of Java as ASM - the simple constructs become the equivalent of "mov eax, 4" and if you want higher level stuff, you'd naturally turn to languages like Scala or Groovy for them. They'd still be able to reach back to Java for core stuff, just like C can call asm and Java can call native methods.

Java and Scala are on the same level. Look at GridGain 3.0, for example... Even hard core functional programming can be pretty close to Scala. Scala, of course, is still generation ahead of Java in most respects...

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